When a Glade Plug-In Just Won’t Cut It…

What do you do if you’ve planned your city’s largest Summer Food Festival around the perimeter of a lagoon which, due to an unfortunately timed renovation to the local solid waste treatment plant, smells distinctly unappetizing?

Well, if you’re Agent Maxwell Smart, you buy this gigantic fan to blow away the stench of raw sewage and replace it with the sweetness of vanilla. If you’re David Henderson, the wastewater treatment utility director of West Lafayette, Indiana, well…you buy this gigantic fan to blow away the stench of raw sewage and replace it with the sweetness of vanilla. “It’s like a big fan with a tank on it that you put a mixture of water and a vanilla-scented masking agent in,” Henderson said of the $1700 XE ORSM Aquafog system.

And how did the unconventional plan to remedy the smelly situation work out? Beautifully, according to Henderson, who gave the device a real acid test by attending Saturday’s Taste of Tippecanoe Festival downwind of the treatment plant. “I did catch a whiff of vanilla, so the wind was blowing toward us,” he said. So successful was the Aquafog, in fact, that the city will continue firing it up “as needed” until the plant’s repairs are completed sometime in this autumn.